Woman King
by skypig21
Summary: A tale of two adventures and two adventurers, McKay and Teyla, who manage to build a solid friendship despite their differences.
1. Chapter 1

Title: Woman King

Author: IAmRightHere

Category: Action/Adventure, Drama

Warnings: Gratuitous McKay whumpage, but for a good cause, as always.

Rating: K+

Spoilers: None

Betas: I was blessed with a Holy Triumvirate of Heavenly Betas for this story. Words cannot express my gratitude to Kamilion, Tazmy and my first true handholder, Pranksta. Prank, blessed are ye among betas.

Summary: A tale of two adventures and two adventurers, McKay and Teyla, who manage to build a solid friendship despite their differences.

Disclaimer: SGA was not created by me. I own no part of it except for the stories in my head.

Feedback: Of all sorts is appreciated and _gratefully_ accepted.

A/N: In my previous fiction, "Twelve," a tiny Rodney and Teyla vignette deposited itself near the end of the story. I wondered about whether these two characters could ever find a common ground, and "Woman King" is a story about how that might happen.

Lyrics to "Woman King" by Iron + Wine are used without permission but with deepest thanks.

**Prologue**

"**A true friend freely advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously, and continues a friend unchangeably."—William Penn**

_hundred years, hundred more  
someday we may see a  
woman king, bloodshot eye  
thumb down and starting to weep_

Teyla Emmagen wasn't interested in the physical sciences or in Prime/Not Prime, and she wasn't loquacious enough to bite back when Rodney McKay was whining all day long.

There was a time, early on, when he had tested how far he could go with her, how much insult Teyla would tolerate. She had accepted none of it and had told him so the first chance she got, as he was walking away from her, smirking and not noticing her dangerous expression.

She had caught him and thrown him down hard, on the mossy soil underneath a tree, rather than on the rocky terrain a few metres away. They were on the Mainland visiting the Athosian settlement, so Teyla had fighting sticks with her for sport, rather than defense. The sticks had bobbled against McKay's Adam's apple as he'd tried to fight off the powerful force that was straddling his chest.

"Say it," she'd said, low and quiet, like a growl.

"What?" he'd wheezed.

She'd pressed the sticks against his throat a little harder, teach-him-a-lesson hard, not enough to actually cut off his windpipe, glaring at him even more intently than before.

"Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I won't call you Xena any more."

"Xena?" she'd whispered, coming so close that he could smell the fragrant balm she used on her hair.

"I will never call you anything insulting ever again. I promise."

With that, she had risen and helped him up. Then she'd smiled and the air had cleared between them

**Chapter One**

No one had been down the stairs in a very long time. Someone had roused him from unconsciousness with a carefully aimed bucket of cold water, thrown in some hardtack and a flask, and left. Now Rodney McKay was hungry, cold, wet and thirsty, in no particular order.

He was locked within a stone-block cell, behind a heavy wooden door that let in a sliver of golden light underneath. The walls and floor, slick with subterranean moisture, radiated a chill that had settled in his bones while he'd sat there hour after hour. Except for its lone occupant, the cell was completely empty, lacking even so much as a thin blanket or a chamber pot. His boredom and disgust were almost as wearing as his fear.

Ronon, Teyla and the Colonel were not with him in this place, and he felt thoroughly unsettled without them.

"Hello?" he called weakly, whenever the sounds of footsteps or opening doors reached him. "Teyla? Ronon? Anyone?" The footsteps continued on without pause, a passing shadow visible from the crack under the door.

After many days spent alone in the dark, someone approached the massive plank door and stopped there. A wedge of torchlight sliding along the space beneath grew brighter. Iron keys jangling together sounded like salvation as the lock fell to order and the door was pulled open.

Silhouetted against the glowing firelight beyond stood Teyla. McKay thought he'd cry with relief.

"Teyla! Thank God!" He reached out to her, but stopped when he noticed her bedecked in a splendid, flowing dress of shining yellow, bordered with white lace and velvet. Her hair was piled on her head in dramatic ringlets and curls, set in place with sparkling hairclips shaped like birds and flowers.

"Were you attacked by Barbies or something?"

He never expected this petticoated version of the Athosian leader to heave her fist and punch him high on his forehead. But hit him she did, with a mighty blow that sent him falling backwards onto the floor. The scientist rubbed the pain away, then looked up at his teammate, dumbfounded, as he tried to pull his addled mind together.

"You won't touch me!" Teyla hissed, sounding as if the Furies themselves were living within her.

"Wha-? Tey?"

"Stand!" Moving forward, hovering over McKay, she had never appeared as large or as ferocious.

With clumsy motions, he scuffed to his feet, alert for another attack. This was Teyla, although her expression showed no recognition of him.

"Take off your shirt," she ordered.

He crossed his arms indignantly. "Okay, what. This is a joke, right? Did Sheppard put you up to this?"

With movements so quick she seemed to blur, Teyla plunged her fist into McKay's solar plexus, and he quickly ended up on the floor, again.

"Centris, deal with him!" she commanded, and a large man with tawny skin and equine features entered the cell and came around to McKay, who lay curled with his arms clasped about himself, struggling to draw breath. He stayed bent over, even as Centris signaled and two guards lifted McKay and stood him on wobbling feet before the woman who was one of McKay's closest friends.

Grabbing McKay's shirtfront, Centris tore it open, sending buttons plinking against walls and floor. Then, using a curved, serrated knife, he slit the undershirt beneath and spread the fabric wide, revealing McKay's torso from neck to navel.

Teyla approached and brought her hand to McKay's chest, then let it roam over his belly. The physicist cringed modestly, shrinking from her touch as the strong soldiers held him up like a cut of meat to a prospective buyer. She grabbed his hand.

"He palms are soft and won't take to farm work," Teyla sighed and then shot him a piercing stare. "You are pale and overfed. Useless!"

McKay bristled at the invasion. "Useless as a farmhand, maybe, but how many cowboys need a Ph.D. in physics? Hmm?"

"You continue to speak to me as if I were a mere dairymaid."

"Oh, you're hardly that, Teyla. Now if you'll just get your guys here to let me go…" He was stifled, this time by a smack to his face. "Ow! Cut it out!"

"You will address me with respect!"

He stared at her, suspecting that perhaps this was not a game or a trick by which to facilitate their escape. This was serious business, something that hadn't occurred to him until now. There was a short silence, while he collected himself and shook some of the cobwebs from his mind.

"I'm sorry," he relented. "The whole starvation, dehydration and hypothermia thing must be getting to me. What should I call you?"

Centris's humid whisper caressed his ear. "You will not _call_ her at all. She is Woman King of Sey. You address her as Your Maje."

McKay glanced at the guards who still held him in an iron grip, then nodded, even though he didn't understand exactly what was going on.

"It doesn't matter," Teyla said. "You are a lowly criminal but, still, I would have hoped to use you as a laborer like the others. Unfortunately, you are not strong and I do not have the time or the resources to make you into anything useful."

With a lift of her chin she turned to Centris. "You agree that he cannot be helped?"

"I believe as Your Maje believes," he responded.

Teyla brought her stare back to McKay's belly. She grimaced in distaste, then squeezed his upper arms and grabbed a bit of flesh around his back. Then she dropped her arm and rolled her eyes like someone who could not find a good apple in the bowl.

"He is not worth the effort. Kill him," she said simply, then turned and stalked out of the cell, leaving her friend behind without even a backwards glance.

"Teyla?" he said helplessly as she departed. Centris and several sentries approached. They produced a heavy iron collar, which they clasped about his neck.

"No! Teyla!" he cried, as a chain was rattled through a thick metal eyelet in the collar's rim. The contraption had been crudely crafted, was rough and pitted and abraded his throat.

"Get it off! Teyla!" He cast pleading eyes past the doorway as his hands were bound with iron cuffs and his ankles hobbled with the same.

McKay was dragged out of his cell and heaved along a dark hallway, then pulled up an uneven stairway into a muddy courtyard under Sey's perpetually leaden sky. A small wooden cart stood ready. McKay was hoisted up and deposited onto the bed like a sack of potatoes and his collar chain affixed to a bracket in the side.

Centris was there to send him off. Leaning so close that McKay could see shining pores on his nose, the aide smiled with delight. He said easily, as if he were reading off a vacation itinerary, "You are condemned to death. This cart will take you to the burial pits, where you will be dispatched with all due speed.

Stuttering fearfully, McKay managed, "C-condemned…" before his tongue failed him.

"By Teyla, our beloved king, sovereign over this great nation!"

TBC...


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

A long while after Teyla had settled things with McKay by holding her sticks to his neck, but before she became the Woman King of Sey, the entire team, through mistake and mishap, had found themselves stuck down in a miserable trap pit on yet another unfriendly world.

Dr. Weir hadn't yet noticed that they were late returning from their assignment. Ronon was hungry and ill-tempered. Colonel Sheppard seemed peevish for having made a mess of things. And McKay was complaining an awful lot about everything, until Teyla couldn't stand it anymore. Just as the man was about to open his mouth to bemoan some other thing, Teyla clamped her hand over his lips, put her face close to his and said, "I have never met anyone better than you at making a bad situation worse! If you have nothing constructive to contribute, then please refrain from speaking!"

This was not much of an insult, really. She could have thrown worse. It kept him quiet for a while, until Dr. Weir radioed and they explained themselves. A rescue party came to retrieve them a short while later.

Dr. McKay refused to speak to Teyla for several days.

The night before their next mission, Teyla came to the lab and watched McKay from the door for a few minutes. Then she knocked and he looked up, finally noticing her. With an uncertain wave, he let her into his sacred space.

Teyla had never spent much time alone with Dr. McKay. He didn't enjoy self-defense training as the Colonel and Ronon did. He ate in his lab more often than in the mess. She rarely saw him use the firing range. And, until this evening, she had never seen the inside of his lab.

"I am sorry to have hurt your feelings the other day," she said.

He fiddled with a round object that had colored wires coming out of it.

She tried again. "We were all tired and hungry. I should not have snapped at you."

He continued to fiddle and also to bend things around the orb with a small, blue-handled pliers. Teyla could tell that he was very upset by the way his hands moved, jerking the wires distractedly like that. For the first time she felt how deeply her words had bothered him.

"None of us would still be here were it not for you, Rodney," she said, trying out his first name to see if that had any effect.

Fiddle, fiddle. Bend, bend.

So Teyla gently grasped the pliers. He let her take them and lay them down. Then she took his hand in hers and he let her do that, as well, although he didn't seem very comfortable with it.

"You have saved this city and everyone in it many times. For that I will always be grateful. Please forgive me."

McKay didn't answer but he nodded and came very close to smiling. Teyla let go of his hand, said goodnight and left the lab.

Their next mission was to the soggy planet, Dorav, where he almost died and where she killed to save him.

…..

McKay thought about Teyla's heartfelt apology as the swaying cart carrying him to his execution rolled slowly toward its destination. The cart was pulled by a great creature resembling an ox, reined by a lone driver in front. McKay sat in the back with an iron collar around his neck, cuffs on his wrists and hobbled by ankle irons. They passed black-mud fields, where freeman and slaves toiled together, hoeing the soil, mulching spindly seedlings to help them grow. The slaves were distinguishable from the freemen by the heavy collars they wore chained to stone posts.

As the cart waddled past one of these fields, McKay heard his name being called from the distance. He peered out over the land and saw Ronon, neck collared and feet hobbled, waving to him. Another worker looked up and shouted as well. The Colonel. Sentries approached them, outraged that slaves would make any noise at all, let alone shout and wave at some passing vehicle. The Colonel stopped shouting when a sentry pulled at his collar chain, choking him; Ronon fought with several of the guards and received a blow to his head with an iron pipe, the Seyans' preferred weapon.

McKay rose up on his knees. He waved and waved and kept Ronon and the Colonel within his sight until the roadway dipped down away from the field and he couldn't see them any longer.

The driver glanced back at his passenger.

"You would be there now if you offered a strong back," he said. "Sey doesn't need wizards and professors."

McKay rolled his eyes but said nothing. The cart continued on its way for a very long time, listing left then right as the roadway tilted and yawed. The chains holding him kept McKay from falling off the back of the cart, but they didn't prevent him from sliding around, so he went this way and that unless he held on to the side.

Some of the field workers, ones who didn't have collars, dropped their tools and followed the cart as it slowly traversed the rutted road. As they passed villages and shops, others came abreast of the wagon and followed in silence, as well. These followers all had the same dower expressions, as if they, too, were marching to their deaths. By and by, a large crowd gathered, some beside the cart, some behind. There were children among them, and McKay thought it extremely distasteful that a mother or father would allow their child to see something like what was about to happen.

"Do you always get so many people out to witness an execution?" he asked the driver, genuinely curious.

"You are special," came the reply. "Many have heard of you."

McKay was halfway self-impressed by that.

They came at last to a flat area, one with burial mounds fitted side by side, unmarked but unmistakable. The driver jumped down and, taking a black iron key from around his neck, unlocked the chain tethering McKay's collar to the cart, and opened his cuffs and anklets, as well.

"Get out," he said, handing the physicist a crude shovel, which McKay took, eyeing it warily. "Dig for yourself," the Seyan said, before turning away and walking to a flat area, where he drew a rectangle in the dirt. "This is to be your grave and you will dig it for yourself."

The crowd stood by watching this without a sound. McKay held the shovel as if he'd never seen one before. He was beginning to shake, hard, and this was obviously annoying the driver, who pulled the collar around McKay's neck and made him approach the gravesite.

Not knowing what else to do, thinking that perhaps he could buy himself some time before the Colonel or Ronon came to save him, McKay began to dig very, very slowly.

…..

They had come to Sey in search of a medicinal plant, a small thing that had shown up in a marketplace elsewhere. Beckett had concluded that the leaves contained a chemical that might speed healing, so a team—Sheppard's team—had come through the stargate with the best of intentions.

The local residents and officials showed an exaggerated interest in Teyla. While unnerving, such focus wasn't particularly unusual. Women in battle dress were not typically as small as Teyla, nor did their personalities radiate as much warmth.

Details of the events were fuzzy in parts. The team was given food and water, obviously tainted with a drug of some sort. McKay remembered nothing after feeling himself fall to the ground and hands dragging him away from Sheppard and the rest.

He had come to his senses in the damp dungeon, where Teyla had struck him and then sent him away to die.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

The shovel chopped away at the dark Seyan soil. As he dug his place of interment, McKay's mind wandered again, to other dark places and times, even though he didn't want it to.

He had taken a blow to the side on another failed mission not too long before soggy Dorav. He didn't recall the name of this planet but remembered that he had suffered a bruise and a lot of pain when he breathed in. All of the team had gotten banged up a bit before finding a place to hide not far—but seemingly leagues—from the stargate. There they chose to rest for the night and try to reach the gate and dial home just before sunrise.

"Everybody okay?" Sheppard inquired. McKay nodded, not yet feeling anything amiss.

Late in the night the ache in his flank awakened him. He groped in his vest for some pain reliever. Teyla was on watch at the time.

"Can I help you?" she asked him.

"Just looking for some…here it is." Pills in hand, he got up, walked over to Teyla and sat down beside her in the moonlight. She had a canteen with her, from which he drank, washing down the medicine.

"Side hurts," he said quietly, so as not to disturb the others.

Teyla frowned. "Let me check it."

McKay pulled back, modestly placing his hands on himself. "It's nothing. Just when I move or breathe it pinches a little."

They were settled on a low plateau with a view of the land stretching out for miles. McKay liked how the verdant fields below had taken on a silvery cast as the moon traveled overhead. It wasn't easy to see anything in this light, least of all a bruise on his pale body. After looking back towards Sheppard and Ronon to ensure he wasn't being observed, he pulled up his shirt and turned the affected area toward his teammate.

She flicked on her high-powered flashlight and McKay jumped at the intrusion. He had forgotten about that and felt completely naked in the glare.

"It is severely bruised," she said, lightly fingering his ribs. Her fingertips felt much softer than he expected, not that he'd spent much time imagining how they would feel. She laid her palm flat, covering the pain with warmth. "It is also swollen. Perhaps a bone is broken."

He looked down at Teyla's dark, slender fingers. They captivated him, as if her hand belonged to a magician trying to catch him up with a clever trick. But Teyla wasn't being the trickster. She removed her hand and pulled down McKay's shirt. He came to his senses and cleared his throat.

She was like Sheppard and Ronon, and could snap his neck with her pinky.

"That was…" he began. "We'll be home soon, if the gate is clear, so, ah, okay thanks."

He rose and walked back to his sleeping place. It took a while for the medicine to begin working. In the meantime, sleep eluded him. The moon looked him in the eye until he covered his face with his arm and drifted off, still feeling the woman's fingers tracing a line over his aching ribs.

McKay thought about this as he dug his grave. He thought about her appraising stare in the dungeon, how her hands had touched him then, too, and about how she had called him useless.

OoOoO

The Seyan royal palace seldom felt like home. When Teyla had first awakened in her huge suite, Prime Minister Centris had been at her bedside, holding her hand, and she thought herself to be someplace else and was afraid until her trusted Minister gave her medicine that helped her recall.

She was the sole surviving member of her regal clan, the only remaining royal occupant of an enormous ancestral estate overlooking thousands upon thousands of acres of farmland and ore mines.

Centris explained about her illness in the wake of her family's demise, about the death of Tarrissa, her sister and queen, and how Teyla alone remained to carry on this grand lineage.

The ornate home spread across a large courtyard and had fancy spires and elaborately decorated chimneys with the family crest—prickly thistle and crossed iron bars—carved and painted and tiled everywhere, lest anyone forget who lived there. Each of its dozens of rooms was crammed with furniture and soft goods of the finest quality, so beautifully turned and woven they could have been created by the gods themselves.

Centris took Teyla to the Great Hall when she felt up to walking. Paintings of her departed family hung there, as a picture history. Teyla resembled Queen Tarrissa, shared her sherry-colored skin and large, almond-shaped brown eyes. The queen in the painting was short, like Teyla. However, unlike the Athosian, Tarrissa was also quite chubby, carrying her weight with arrogance, as if she were proud of her indulgences. Her plump, dimpled fingers grasped a black metal bar in one hand and a sprig of prickly thistle in the other. Teyla wondered whether she and her sister had loved and confided in each other, for that was what sisters did.

The queen looked comfortable in her exquisite clothing, which Teyla found to be much too confining and woefully impractical. Her skirts and petticoats gathered dollops of mud from the ground and the stitched flowers on the toes of her delicate needlepoint shoes were stained black from the soil's dark pigmentation.

Centris said, "You were the younger sister. In time, you will remember yourself and then find a suitably pedigreed mate to fight the battles of your kingdom for you, so that he will become your king and the line will continue.

Teyla didn't like the idea of having a king. She would rather have fought for her people herself than marry someone to do it for her.

"Don't be silly, Your Maje. Among royalty only the king may use weapons. You have not been taught how to defend yourself. Most usually, you will visit the people, give them trinkets and cakes and then return to the cleanliness and safety of your palace. As queen you have only tertiary power and the right to legislate only under duress."

"I am under duress now, am I not?"

"Of course, for we are in crisis. But no laws need your attention at this moment."

"I wish to legislate full overseer ship for myself."

He laughed generously. "Only the king has full overseer ship!"

"Then I am king," she said.

Centris stopped laughing.

Supper was served to her in an opulent dining hall. Teyla ate alone, since every member of her family was dead. After the meal proper, before the delicate porcelain plate of sweetmeats was laid before her, the Prime Minister brought a tiny cut-crystal glass filled with a bitter brown liquid.

"Your medicine," he told her. "To give you your strength back and make you well again."

She drank this and saw the stories that Centris had told her come to life in her mind—the many years of living in this castle with her sister Tarrissa, the queen, and the king who ruled over her and over everyone in the nation of Sey.

The medicine's nasty taste was tempered by the sweetmeats that Teyla indulged in afterwards. A dozen were set on the lovely plate and Teyla usually ate them all, even though she wasn't hungry anymore.

…..

After condemning the pale man, Teyla, the self-appointed Woman King of Sey, watched from the castle's highest tower as the cart carrying him made its way to the burying pit. It was a shame that Sey needed no wizards or inventors. They needed muscle rather than great ideas. She had been told by Centris that the scientist had little potential and would likely eat more than his fair share and offer nothing in return. She had thought it wise to keep him a fair bit longer, perhaps dose him with a potion to keep him still, but Centris had disagreed.

"Even potion must be conserved," he'd said, with perfect logic. "Meanwhile we must either feed him or let him starve. Your Maje, condemnation is a merciful end to him."

As she watched, two of the field workers, collared slaves, waved and called to the professor in the cart. One slave was knocked down; the other gave up on his own. These were the people who had come with the professor to this world. They, too, had been assessed by her and deemed able to work the field. It was sad that they had to watch their friend being taken away, but some things couldn't be helped.

It was mid-afternoon. Teyla was tired, her eyelids drooping as she watched the cart disappear beyond the edge of the far field. As if reading her mind, Centris appeared by her side.

"You must rest, Your Maje. The day has been too much even for one as strong and resilient as you."

She nodded and allowed herself to be led to the high bed that dominated the room. It was covered with soft quilts and many pillows in various shapes, to support any part of her. She climbed two steps to the plush mattress, as Centris closed the curtains that hung from the heavily carved posters that stood at each corner.

"Sleep, now, my lady," he said, softly, as if soothing a troubled child.

Without another sound, Teyla shut her eyes and slept as if she had been weeks without respite.

…..

McKay stood in the early evening gloom, listening to hoof beats plod in from the distance. Blood droplets lay splattered in the grave that he'd dug. The shovel's handle was streaked with red, his soft hands having blistered until they bled. The clopping hooves came louder until, by the light of lanterns carried by the murmuring crowd, the obvious and inevitable time had come.

His executioner had arrived.

McKay's gallows was the dirt under his feet, and the riding figure carried no firearm or other weapon. He was tall, like the one Teyla had called Centris, and shared his prominent features. He rode atop a huge horse-like animal, rather like an overgrown Clydesdale with an extraordinarily long coat and two-toed hoofs. It was grey all over, including its large eyes.

Leaping from his high perch, the executioner sent up a cloud of dust when he landed. Frightened, the crowd stepped back and held their children closely. He was dressed in black canvas with a loose, heavy cape over all. From his breast pocket he extracted a small glass bottle filled with a yellowish liquid. The masses gasped and backed up farther.

"You know this," said the man, holding up the bottle so that everyone could see it clearly.

"What is it?" McKay asked the workers and villagers around him, but they seemed too frightened to speak.

His killer approached. "You are condemned to die, but the king has said you shall not be beaten to death like so many others."

"No b-beating," McKay stammered, trying to see that as a good thing. "This d-day's finally looking up."

The black-clad man held out the bottle to him. "Instead you must drink this. It is a poison. This way you will not die as violently as they did," and he gestured to the many anonymous graves all around.

McKay shook so hard he couldn't have grasped the bottle even if he were stupid enough to try.

"No…" he managed, as the executioner stepped towards him and others that he couldn't see grabbed his arms and forced his head back, prying open his jaw. Wide-eyed with terror, McKay tried to fight off this assault, twisted his body, sputtered and spit as the deadly fluid was poured into his mouth. Then his jaw was forced shut.

The cemetery was perfectly silent except for the sound of McKay breathing rapidly through his nose. That sound ended when the executioner pinched his nostrils shut. The large, grey horse shook its head, jangling its halter about. McKay stopped struggling.

He'd swallowed the yellow liquid.

The people holding him released their grip. The smartest man in two galaxies now stood by himself, looking at the many who had gathered there to see him die and then peering up at the unfamiliar constellations blooming in the evening sky.

At first, he felt a warm tingling in his mouth and throat. Not too bad, really. In a minute the warmth had become stinging, then burning, and he salivated and then shook and paled, getting thoughts in his head about Sheppard and Ronon and Samantha Carter and about his piano and his favorite cat and the stargate and the Periodic Table of the Elements and a lot of other things that had interested him over the course of his life. He cried a little bit, because he was afraid and very sad that he would never see Atlantis again or his family there.

Then he fell into nothing.

TBC…


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

On a planet called Dorav, a year before McKay was poisoned on Sey for being smarter than everyone else, the entire team, which included a mechanical engineer named Mercer, was captured and all sorts of terrible things had happened to them. They were captured because the High Mater had decided that he could not live without taking advantage of McKay's knowledge and skills. They had been taken while attempting to dial the gate home, always the saddest occasion for a kidnapping…so close to safety.

And because he had been stolen, when the High Mater could have simply asked nicely, McKay had refused to participate in anything the High Mater had planned. He would not fix their broken particle beam accelerator or the leaking fusion facility. He wasn't going to drop a dime on Newtonian physics or even describe his persistent belief in the co-existent perfection and chaos of the universe.

The Doravans tried tempting him with pleasure and, when that didn't work, they tried persuading him with pain. They were unaware that McKay had been tortured in the past and had learned a thing or two about resisting.

"Stubborn little troll," he heard Teyla say, affectionately, as he came to hours later in the cell that the team shared.

"The hell?" He heard Sheppard's shocked tone.

"I believe that it is making the rounds in Atlantis this week in reference to Dr. McKay. Last week it was…author?…maniac?"

"Authoritarian egomaniac," Ronon supplied.

"Wha' hap'n?" McKay sputtered.

"Yes, that was it. Authoritarian egomaniac."

"'m dyin'. Oh, my head!"

"Colonel Sheppard, what is an authoritarian egomaniac?"

"It's a fancy way of saying he's an asshole."

There was a pause. Then, "Oh," Teyla said. "I would never call him that."

McKay felt Teyla wrap her arm around his shoulders, lift him a little and place a cup of water against his lips. He drank without opening his eyes, but he knew that Teyla was smiling and he didn't want to give himself away unless he had to, didn't want to smile in spite of himself.

The worst part of their captivity on Dorav involved the age-old practice of encouraging self-sacrifice in order to save others. The High Mater had McKay brought to a dimly lit, closet-sized room, with a window to another, larger room taking up almost an entire wall. He was made to sit on a chair in the center of this tiny room and forced to watch while his teammates were tortured.

"You see what we have placed on the Colonel's finger?" asked the Mater's first in command. The Colonel sported an object similar in size and shape to a thimble, tied to his right index finger. Then the Colonel's hands were secured to the chair on which he sat, which itself was bolted to the floor. "This device implants memories of the battlefield, of tragedy and terror and evisceration and pain. It is quite effective in eliciting cooperation from those on whom we use it. And it is going to bring us your cooperation, as well."

With that, the Mater's second powered up the unit and that was when Sheppard gritted his teeth and rocked his head to and fro and suffered beyond anything that McKay had ever witnessed before.

Sheppard obviously knew that he was being watched and by whom. He had told McKay once that it seemed like everyone in the entire galaxy knew how to get his geek to cooperate. McKay hadn't argued with him about it then, and his psyche felt ground down, now, pulverized under the weight of the unseen horrors he imagined his friend was living through.

"McKay!" Sheppard shouted, and the physicist watched him trying to get the words out. "McKay, you asshole! Don't…tell…them…anything! Do…do you hear?"

And McKay was so…happy? Not happy. Relieved? When Sheppard said this, because he was about ready to just talk and talk and talk. He was going tell them about Einstein and tell them about Euclid and Oppenheimer and talk and talk and talk until his mouth was dry and they let his friends go.

Sheppard's session lasted an eternity. Ronon's did, as well, except that Ronon was so creepily _quiet_ about it. The Runner took the memories of others and practically _smiled_ because they were nothing compared with what he'd seen once the Wraith had come to his world, nothing compared with the memories that tortured him every night when he lit the candle for his dead wife and his dead friends and when he prayed his short but heartfelt prayer for the safety and protection of his new comrades.

"I do this each night when we are not off world," he'd told McKay. And the doctor had had some trouble getting his mind around something so thoughtful.

After Mercer, came Teyla, his sister, his beautiful friend.

"Not this," McKay said, his face going slack with dread. "Stop…no…" He tried to justify himself. "My commander has ordered me to remain silent. Don't…" and he'd looked through the window, as Teyla was secured to the chair, and as the wretched clip was placed on her finger.

Sheppard had told him, _told_ him.

He pressed his hands on the window, letting his sweating palms deposit a filmy moisture on the glass. She was strong; she could take it. Teyla would want him to follow orders. She would want him to be as strong as he could be, although he had no idea how strong that was.

The clip glowed and Teyla threw back her head and clamped her eyes closed as someone else's death claimed her, as someone else's loss emptied her, as someone else's life—perhaps a child's—was ended by her own hands. Sheppard had cried; Ronon had not. Mercer, a pale, slide-rule type like McKay, had made a lot of noise. He'd vomited, wet himself and then, thankfully, passed out. McKay didn't want to know what Teyla was going to do.

His hands were free. The chair on which he had been sitting was not bolted to the floor. He wasn't so helpless after all. Soon he had the chair raised over his head and was battering it against the window, which didn't break but flexed and bowed and rattled loudly. He tore his arms around, repeatedly bringing the chair to connect with the window, until he felt his rotator cuffs screaming and his elbows felt like glass shards had been shoved into them. Teyla heard all of this noise; she knew that McKay was there and that he was trying to get to her.

By the time the Mater's men entered McKay's observation room and rendered him unconscious with a blow to the head, Teyla was laughing as loudly as she could, yelling "Rodney, you authoritarian egomaniac! Tell them _nothing_!"

OoOoO

On Sey, a year later, King Teyla awoke from her nap in her soft, high bed, and remembered something about the man she had ordered killed that afternoon, about his body and about the time—imagined, of course—when she had known him before.

These thoughts disturbed her, so much so that she climbed out of bed and went to the window. She replayed seeing the cart dip over the hill. The moon hung in the night sky as a silvery crescent, and an emptiness opened up within her.

TBC...


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

Teyla had hit him when he'd reached out to her in the horrid cell, had looked at him as if he were something filthy. Teyla, his friend of so many years…

Someone lifted McKay's head and placed a flask to his lips, letting a thick, sour liquid dribble over his tongue. It was a woman, but her voice and her hands were cold and abrasive. A rough sheet under his head smelled like sick, felt stiff with it. His body burned and tingled and felt so, so heavy, as if he were tied with lead weights.

He tried to speak to ask where he was, what planet he might be on, now, but managed on a vague mumble.

"Professor…not speak…"

Professor. Oh, God. He was dead on Sey.

Then all was quiet again until someone laid a lantern nearby and placed a cold compress against his brow. Water passed his lips, then more of the thick, sour stuff. He was sick again, and didn't realize that he was crying and asking for his friends.

"Sleep," said someone. "The poison…" but he was asleep, as he'd been told.

OoOoO

The team's escape from Dorav began when the guards watching Teyla shout as she was tortured, the ones who prevented McKay from breaking through the window of his closet, turned out to have no stomach for seeing a woman in so much pain.

"Come with us," the guard said, in a whisper this time, as he passed a water flask among Sheppard and his team. The cell door was opened wide for them.

"You're helping us escape?" Sheppard asked, incredulously.

"The High Mater loses respect when he wishes to harm a woman, especially when he commands us to do it for him."

Sheppard looked over at Teyla. She was still troubled from the prolonged session to which she'd been subjected. Mercer took her arm, and she pretended to stumble. They were going to play it like she was a soft thing, unbearably delicate.

The five were taken from their prison, a couple of their packs returned to them, and brought to the stargate. Then weapons fire erupted and the Mater's disloyal guards fell dead with burning holes blasted through and through their bodies. Dozens of loyalists appeared with the High Mater in command, intending to recapture the Lanteans. That was when the team had scattered. That was how McKay and Teyla became separated from the rest deep in the Doravan wilderness.

OoOoO

After her evening meal, King Teyla of Sey felt the pull of sleep, once again. Centris told her that this had always been her habit. The bed was so welcoming and a grey breeze moved the curtains that surrounded it.

Teyla told one of her handmaids, "I dreamed about the pale man taken from the prison beneath this castle. He seemed familiar to me."

The handmaid fluffed Teyla's pillows and pushed them to the perfect angle beneath her king's head. "You were ill for a time, mixed up. Your meal will settle your cares and bring you to health once again."

When the servants left, Teyla fought off her grogginess and sat up in the bed. Her body had been shapelier some days ago. Now it felt as if it were melting into fat, as if she were supposed to be moving faster and bringing her limbs around and holding the iron pipes used to beat prisoners.

She recalled a room with golden light shining in patterns on the floor. She held two iron pipes, one in each hand. These pipes were coming down on the large-maned man and on the dark-haired man she had sent to the fields. She held the iron pipes to the neck of the pale man that she had sentenced to death. And the pale man had made her a promise and he had held her hand once when her eyes were so heavy that she could not keep them open.

"_Please,"_ she heard him say, and it broke her heart and hardened it at the same time.

OoOoO

McKay slept as the executioner's poison tried to leech the life out of him. He felt heavy, as if he'd run for miles, as he had on Dorav, when the High Mater's men were after them.

Leafy branches whipped against his face, smacking him and smacking him again as if _he_ were the one shooting at innocent people for no good reason. Homeboys loyal to the Doravan High Mater pursued McKay and Teyla into the waterlogged forest. Without weapons there was little they could do except try the age-old survival technique known as Running Like Bats Out of Hell.

They scaled a low fence—right into a holding pen containing an enormous and enormously annoyed pig-like thing. Teyla managed to sprint to the other side with only a minor stumble. McKay caught his leg in something and tore a hole in his calf. Then he fell chin-down into the shriekingly disgusting pig shit, where he struggled in the slimy crap to get his feet under himself.

They were coming, the Mater's men, stupid, ignorant people, serving under a sadist, a madman. They were armed and dangerous and determined to shoot him and Teyla dead. This was no time to pause.

Scuttling in the sty, with the pig snorting and squealing in outrage, McKay wanted to live or else to give in, or bravely face these pursuers or cower with his head hidden until all of the scary stuff went away.

Then Teyla was there, pulling at his arm, digging her feet into the mess that flew up all over her in the backwash from McKay's faltering feet and the now-hysterical pig's scrambling hoofs. Teyla pulled him and pulled, telling him, "Get up, Rodney! They are close behind us!" as if it had never occurred to her to let him go.

McKay found a foothold and slogged onwards, Teyla leading him over the other side of the low fence. Adrenaline anesthetized him so that he wasn't even limping, although his flesh was badly torn and he was bleeding heavily.

They came to a part of the forest clogged with low shrubs and eye-level saplings, and Teyla ran ahead, trusting that McKay was right behind her, occasionally jerking her head to the side to see him peripherally.

Green firebolts flew past McKay, sizzling and bright and sour-smelling. The powerful shots were poorly aimed, and they slammed into tree trunks or the ground, or else arced over his head into the distance on either side. He saw the flash of Teyla's copper hair as another blast crackled by his ear…and then she was gone—disappeared!—making him race on alone. He looked from side to side, searching for her, his lifeline, scarcely allowing himself to think that she would leave him at a time like this.

The strafing discharges became more frequent and blew by closer, singeing his shoulder and his arm, before he took a glancing hit to the back, which sent him sprawling, effectively tasered and left dimwitted by the shock of it. The Mater's loyal followers slowed their approach and a long pause happened as his senses dulled.

"Don't kill me," he slurred, watching the colors of earth and sky and people and plants form kaleidoscope patterns before his eyes.

Someone kicked him in the chest and so he curled up to keep his innards safe, painfully aware that his burned back presented a worthy target, as well.

"Oh, God, go away!"

But they didn't and the loyal guards aimed their potent weapons at him. His breaths came faster and faster and all of the little sensible thoughts in his mind got bungled up in one another.

"Don'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon't…" he said, like a mantra, as if it would protect him. "Don'tdon'tdon'tdon'tdon't…"

Then there was a rifle shot, which splintered a nearby tree. Then—thankyou thankyou thankyou—a flash of copper hair and someone was standing before him, facing the great crowd that was calling for blood, a small, lone person coming between Rodney McKay and his doom.

"Stand back!" she said.

It was Teyla, her P90 raised. A surviving mutinous guard, hungry for rebellion, had beckoned her in the forest and handed her the only weapon he'd saved from their cache. McKay didn't know this then. He knew only that Teyla had come back for him when he really hadn't thought that she would.

"I will kill any of you who come closer!"

And with that, she locked her knees and drew the weapon up in front of her face, her arms steadied, her back straight as steel. Teyla, a woman raised in a tent. Someone McKay had mocked and referred to as Xena. Someone who once had said to him, "You do not respect me. Do you think that I am stupid?" and he had scoffed and walked away from her.

Then, even though it was very loud, the P90 sounded like survival to him, as did the bodies thumping as they hit the ground.

OoOoO

He lay curled in a perspiring ball, groaning at the lightning bolts searing through his head and at the grinding ache in his belly and the stinging pain in his blistered hands. McKay, poisoned by the yellow liquid, came back to the present feeling as if his skin were aflame and a heavy quilt lying on top of him, weighing him down like a suffocating veil. Someone came and put their hand on his forehead and removed the blanket. A light breeze moved over him and the sweat cooled. He sighed with relief and opened his eyes.

The driver and a small boy were looking at him. Behind them stood a woman, thin, small and haggard. Behind her were several other men peering at him curiously, all of them dressed as the driver was, in ragged trousers and stained overshirts. Their dirty boots testified to long days of hard work.

"He is awake," said the woman, unnecessarily. "Make him go, now, before he is found."

"I do not think that he is well enough to leave this bed, let alone to stumble around outside, Leenee," the driver said. "Can you hear me, man?"

McKay twitched his fingers in response, not able to move, yet, or speak.

"Good. You dug your burial pit two nights ago, but instead we have given you your life back. Now you will heal and take us with you to your world."

The addled physicist waited a while to respond. The driver's wife, Leenee, tsk-tsked in annoyance, gave him a dribble of water and put a cold compress to his head. He would have given just about anything for a couple of milligrams of morphine sulfate right about then. Here he had come to this God-awful backwater in search of a medicinal plant. He hoped that they had better cures than just compresses and water.

"Family…not…whole town."

The driver smiled and gestured to the room around him. "These are my family," he said. With an arm around his son, he held the child close. "My son. My wife. My brothers and cousins and the cousins of my cousins. We waited for the executioner to depart to inform the king that his task was completed. The delay almost proved fatal to you and for that we are sorry. The grave that you dug was filled with stones and covered over. We brought you here and gave you medicine to counteract the poison."

Crouching next to McKay, the driver, little more than a shadow, now, as McKay began to fade again, said, "When you are well enough we will go to your world and never again have to throw bodies into graves that the condemned have had to dig for themselves."

The room spun, and McKay rapidly tumbled down into darkness. His last thought this time was for his friends, his own cousins in this galaxy, and how much he wanted to bring them home with him through the stargate.

TBC...


	6. Chapter 6

_Summary: The adventure continues as the events on Dorav a year ago and Sey in the present day intertwine..._

**Chapter Six**

McKay couldn't help himself. He kept getting lost in time and place. Sometimes he recognized that he was sick in a hut on Sey. Other times, he thought that he might be sick as a dog on Dorav a year ago.

Two days had passed since McKay and Teyla had taken their flight into the Doravan woods. McKay's leg had begun to swell and seep, and McKay had felt himself succumbing to infection. Not thinking clearly, at the cusp of a panic, he had wiped his penknife blade on his shirt and handed it to Teyla.

The wound smelled bad. And it looked bad. And it hurt like the devil.

"Just do it." McKay gritted his teeth and scrubbed a hand at the sweat droplets that threatened to fall into his eyes. "Before I end up losing my leg. Okay? Just...just get it over with."

Teyla swallowed and avoided looking at the ragged edges of the festering injury, as McKay sat shivering before her. The knife was not nearly clean enough. The wound was contaminated by the muck in the sty. The air around them carried unseen particles that had taken to living in the gash, grown in its bountiful moisture, would soon spread to the farthest reaches of his body, if they had not done so already.

"This will do you no good," she said, McKay saw her eyes mirrored in the blade. "It will make things worse."

"No," he replied, slumping tiredly—but cautiously, since his back was burned—as his fever and abject terror shook him once again. "It needs to drain. Right? You lance it, it drains and all the bad stuff goes away."

He didn't blame himself for acting childish. Who wouldn't feel vulnerable, lost on this rotting sponge of a planet, split from the rest of the team, frightened for themselves and their missing friends?

"Rest, Doctor. I will try to find dry wood for a fire."

McKay nodded and leaned back against a sodden tree trunk for support. The rains came, again, so he tucked himself small, even though it bothered his festering leg wound and made his fever-sore hips ache. Teyla rubbed at her own calf, as if she were experiencing sympathy pains for him. McKay didn't find the idea so surprising. A woman capable of seeing through the eyes of a Wraith a million miles away should have no trouble feeling a twinge or two for a sick man sitting not three feet from her.

"Don't go far," he called to her back, the sound of his voice dampened by the mist, which shrouded her as she searched for useable wood.

"I will not," she replied, sounding more motherly than his mother ever had.

OoOoO

The Seyan executioner's poison was a strong one. In his own arduous recovery, McKay slowly rose out of the confused place that held him captive as effectively as Teyla's dungeon. He had bouts of clarity followed by blank-outs that might have been spent out cold or babbling or staring at nothing. Sometimes the driver's wife spoke to him, her shrill voice penetrating his fog. Once he found himself standing outside the driver's stuffy cabin, just like that, and a cousin or brother had brought him back inside and gently laid him on the bed again.

Many days passed like this as McKay fought his way through. Most of the time he sweated and wheezed, and his heart felt as if it were beating its way out of his chest. He needed to sit up but it made him dizzy. He needed to lie down but that made it hard to breathe. Food came back up, water wouldn't stay down. Nothing helped but time and the thick liquid that the driver's wife kept giving to him, repeating a dose when he couldn't keep one inside him.

This healing process took many days. Then the morning came when the physicist opened his eyes and saw where he really was and remembered the yellow liquid and Teyla in her yellow gown. He missed Ronon and the Colonel and asked after his friends. No one had news of anyone other than Teyla, who was still alive and still ruling from her fine castle many, many miles away.

Two weeks passed, then three. He became stronger, but had lost weight and tone, Teyla's assessment notwithstanding.

One night McKay sat up in his bed and looked at the moonlight shining on the coverlet that he had kicked off in his agitated sleep. He thought of Teyla, and the time that she put her small, callused hand on his injured side. Now, she was living in the fortress, surrounded by handmaids and sycophants, believing herself to be king of this horrible, squelching nation with its black-mud fields that yielded mostly rocks.

He needed to find the Colonel and Ronon, maybe go to the field where he'd seen them last. If either of his friends had managed to fetch Teyla and steal her away from the castle, news of this would have reached the unwashed masses, most of who seemed to be related to the driver.

"She's still up there," the driver had told him earlier that day. "She eats candy and lies in her bed a lot. My cousin's cousin's wife is a handmaid there."

McKay's feet touched the cabin's straw-covered floor. All of the driver's family lay sleeping. They wouldn't realize he'd left until morning. The stargate stood at the base of the far mountains. He would find Teyla, remind her somehow of who she was and take her home, back to Atlantis. This is what she would do for him if the tables were turned.

With careful movements, McKay removed the garments with which the driver's wife had dressed him as he lay on the sickbed. Leenee had washed some of the driver's clothing and hung it to dry on a rack near the door. McKay slipped on an overshirt and breeches, which came to just below his knees, some heavy stockings and boots found in a corner.

Leenee had tried feeding him but his stomach had rebelled most of the time. Feeling a little lightheaded still from everything, McKay grabbed a few dry biscuits from a plate on the supper table and a flask of water near the plate. Then he opened the cabin door.

The driver was expecting McKay to take him and his posse of relatives to Atlantis soon. The physicist wasn't going back without his own family, as well, as many of them as he could find. The cabin stood on a flattened-out portion of hillside, farther east of the burial pits than the castle stood to the west, a distance of many miles, but not too far for his purpose. Teyla would go ten times farther for a friend.

McKay had believed Teyla when she'd called him useless. He wasn't suited to shooting people or hitting them with sticks, or blowing up things with conventional explosives. Although he had some skill with the practical application of nuclear and super-nuclear weapons, on the firing range he rarely lucked out and hit the target.

Useless or not, this strange adventure had gone on far too long. The Colonel and Ronon's servitude, Teyla's bewildering rise to aristocracy, McKay's cloudy recollections of his own horrible execution fueled his steps.

Staying off the cart path lest he be seen, McKay traipsed towards the huge ramparts. Roadside mud sucked at his thin boots, slowing his progress. His head spun from time to time, and he wondered whether he ought to have waited a while longer before starting out towards the castle.

The scientist walked through the night. At daybreak he rested, hidden away under shrubs. When dusk came, he rose and started off again. By the smell, McKay could tell when he was nearing the burial pits. Skirting the edge of that place, he continued on, now halfway to Teyla.

"And then what?" he asked himself. He had no idea, even though he was considered by many to be a clever problem solver, and self-reliant when he needed to be.

OoOoO

"You will need three wives," Teyla had said, when they were still in the sopping-wet Doravan forest, still lost and split from the rest of the team. McKay's leg wept serum and had become sticky. He had learned that day that Teyla was a genius: She had managed to build and light a fire and heat water for compresses, which had helped a little in draining the sick detritus out of him.

McKay glanced up from the radio he'd found in the pack given to them when the rebellious guards had first helped them to escape. It was a relatively simple matter to recalibrate the frequency to accept shortwave transmissions. With the ionic interference on this planet, shortwave was the only radio communication possible over any distance. Mercer, hopefully still alive over with Sheppard's team, would eventually come to the same conclusion. In the meantime, McKay struggled to mess with the innards of his radio but found his usually graceful fingers clumsy with his fever.

Appearing not to have heard Teyla's remark, he disinterestedly mouthed "Oh, yeah? Why?" This as he looked about for a tiny stick or some other thing to use as a small tool.

"Because you want someone to be your mistress and cook for you."

He didn't respond, focused on his task.

"Also," Teyla continued. "You need another woman who is fierce and strong who will go into battle with you."

Again, McKay didn't look up.

"You will want someone else to work with you in your lab, someone who will interest you long after her beauty has faded. I don't believe that you will be satisfied with one or another, and there are not enough hours in the day for a single person to be all of the things you would wish."

"Huh," McKay uttered, reaching down to grasp a stiff pine needle, perfect for the task at hand. He sat down and began moving things around inside the radio's guts, adjusting and deftly making subtle but necessary changes.

"I don't need someone to do everything for me, Teyla." He held up the portable. "I'm capable."

Teyla found additional fire wood and brought it to their camp, and filled their canteens in a nearby stream. There was no food source about, so they would go hungry after their rations were gone.

It took McKay another hour to finally replace the radio casing and turn on the unit. It sizzled for a moment and then produced the most beautiful sound of all—Sheppard's voice calling for them across the vast plain that separated the two parts of the team.

"Colonel! Oh, thank God!"

"Thank Mercer, you mean."

McKay smiled at that. "Mercer. Me. God. Not much difference today."

McKay was still feverish and his leg was not at all suited for traveling, so Teyla had to support him on their long walk to meet with Sheppard, Ronon and Mercer at the stargate.

It took almost two days to reach the others, during which McKay and Teyla stopped frequently so that he could rest and drink and take useless Tylenol because it certainly couldn't hurt. Teyla took watch at night. She brought him water and without complaint gave him her shoulder to lean on as they walked.

McKay thought that Teyla deserved a medal for all of this, something big, made of solid gold.

"Maybe you should go on ahead," he suggested, when they were still some distance from the gate. "Catch up with Sheppard, go back to Atlantis and bring a med team to get me.

But Teyla refused. "What if some animal noses out your injury and comes for you?"

He shrugged because he hadn't thought of that and, to be perfectly honest, he really didn't want her to leave him alone, anyway.

They were thin and weary coming through the gate, Ronon now supporting McKay, who collapsed the moment the wormhole expelled him. The next few days were lost to him, a white blur of pain and sickness and people trying to help him along. When he finally came back to himself, he asked to be allowed to return to his quarters and, much to McKay's surprise, Carson had allowed it. On the way there, he considered stopping to see Teyla to thank her. But he was tired and decided to do it later.

The next day, McKay received word that Teyla had been admitted to the infirmary with a very high fever of unknown origin.

TBC...


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

_hundred years, hundred more  
someday we may see a  
woman king, wristwatch time  
slowing as she goes to sleep  
_

"_Carson says that you're going to get better, so please…"_

Teyla jerked awake, clutching a pillow to her chest, and feeling so much fear that it couldn't have been conjured from nothing.

It was the condemned man, again. The professor had been executed weeks ago, but his ghost haunted her each time she closed her eyes to rest. She had given the order, yes, but Centris had insisted, had pulled her aside and convinced her to believe that she had no choice in this or in anything else.

That is how Teyla remembered it, now, even though she sometimes had difficulty distinguishing between truth and confabulation.

"Centris!" she called, as dusk colored the distant horizon. "Centris! Come here!"

"Your Maje?" It was a handmaid, coming from her waiting place in the hallway.

"Get me Centris! I must speak with him at once."

"He is outside of the gate, my lady, but will be back at supper to dine with you. Shall I dress you for dinner?"

Teyla looked at her clothing, at the silks and shining robes with velvet details running down the seams. These beautiful things felt so soft against her skin and looked so lovely matched with her copper hair.

"Yes. No," she wavered. "I prefer not to dine this evening. I wish a carriage to take me out of the gate, for a ride at sunset."

The handmaid frowned. "Yes, my lady. Your Maje shall have it."

Teyla nodded as the servant left. Then she hurried to her chiffarobe, which opened to reveal dozens of brilliantly colored ruffled dresses and beaded gowns, all made by the most talented hands, each stitch evenly spaced, with tight bodices and buttoned foresleeves and heavy skirts hobbling her as much as the manacles the pale man wore after she had condemned him. She wanted to wear something darker and more like the guards' breeches, something that she could run in, fly across the fields and valleys beyond the castle wall.

In a short while, her carriage was waiting, with Centris standing beside it.

"I thought that you were away until supper," she remarked.

"My Maje, come with me, please. I wish to show you."

"My carriage…"

"Will wait until you return."

She looked at him for a moment, and then followed him back into the fortress. He led her to the Great Hall, a breathtakingly beautiful room with high stained-glass windows and gilded chandeliers and friezes up where the walls joined the arched ceilings. These murals depicted the long history of Teyla's relations, and the righteous battles that they had fought and won. Along the walls hung life-sized portraits, each footed by a metal plaque identifying the subject.

"These are your family," Centris said, gesturing to the room in general.

"I know that, Prime Minister," Teyla answered wearily. "I am of them, am I not?"

"Of course," he said, bowing respectfully. "And I am sorry for the uprising that killed your kin only just a short time ago. It must have been a difficult time for you."

Teyla nodded, knowing that it had been, but not feeling it that much. She noticed Centris peering at her carefully and tipped her head curiously in response.

"I am sorry, Your Maje. You are the image of your sister, the queen. She and the king had been so happy with each other."

"I…I know," She looked down, only partially remembering this, as if seeing it out of the corner of her eye. Then, raising her head, feeling suddenly confident again, she said, "But now I am king."

"As you say," he responded, obsequious as always.

"You bring me here to remind me again, as if I would forget."

"Why did you call up a carriage to travel from this house? It will take you nowhere you want to see."

"I wish to visit the grave of the pale man, the professor."

At this, Centris paused. A dart of his eyes and Teyla saw a speck of fear in them, a secret that began to nag at her then like a stone in her shoe.

"Of course, Maje Teyla, you may go wherever you desire. After supper we can travel together."

"I will go there now. And I will not be dining this evening," she dismissed, turning to leaving the gilded room. and its half-lit memories behind her.

"As you wish," he said, courteously. "I am certain that you will always choose to do what is best for your people. Even if those choices are difficult ones."

Teyla paused at the threshold to the Great Room. There were images in her mind of her people, but they were changing from one picture to another, from the tall portraits hung on the walls, to real people someplace quite different, as if Sey were her beloved home and her prison, as well.

OoOoO

After the team's return from their torture and separation on Dorav, when Teyla's fever had spiked frighteningly high, McKay had stayed at her bedside because she meant more to him than he expected, and he was more worried that she would die than he had ever thought possible. She had become part of his history, and knew him better than his sister or his mother had, maybe even better than Heightmeyer. And he had told Heightmeyer everything.

This was the first time he really felt horrified and emptied out at the thought of her leaving like this. When he had been brave, she had told him so. When he had been stupid, she had told him that, as well, but usually in a nice way, the Teyla way, especially after she'd choked him with her sticks on the Mainland that time.

"I am lost!" she said in her delirium. "Aiden, please, I am so thirsty…"

Teyla spoke unwittingly to a lot of people she dreamed during this time, to Lt. Ford, the Colonel, Ronon, her mother. She even spoke to McKay, although she was watching him in her head and not seeing him beside her.

She exclaimed, "Watch where you are stepping, Doctor. There are traps laid all along this path."

McKay tried to recall a time when they had voyaged to such a place, but couldn't recall anything specific. Then he realized that every planet and settlement that they had been to was like that in one way or another—with hidden threats strewn everywhere.

Teyla's blistering fever lasted eight days. McKay stayed with her until Carson sent him away to collect himself.

The physician said, "Go on. Get some sleep. I don't want to see you here for at least six hours. I only just released you a few days ago. You're going to end up sick again, as well."

"But you said that Teyla's not contagious."

Beckett breathed evenly and worked his jaw to stifle a full-blown argument with his friend.

"If there's any change, I'll let you know."

McKay left the infirmary, but returned exactly six hours later, looking as rumpled as when he had last been there. Ronon had come by in the meantime and left a charm of some sort, something that McKay had seen him buy at a market on P4X-998, hanging off of the heart monitor.

Taking Teyla's hand, McKay seated himself. This was many days into her illness. She was pale and thin and looked almost aged, despite Carson's best efforts to keep her hydrated, to bring down the fever.

He held her hand and spoke to her. "Teyla, this is Rodney McKay," he said. "I hope that you can hear me. Carson says that you're going to get better, so please…" He really didn't know how to finish saying this, especially since he was lying. He never thought he'd be saying these things to anyone, let alone her.

"Please," he repeated.

OoOoO

McKay had walked and crept and crouched and hidden for three days. Now the sun was setting over the distant mountains, and the parapet surrounding Teyla's fortress rose up before him, black and impenetrably massive, but nothing more than a problem to be solved to the positive thinker who stood below it.

On his trek, McKay had stopped by the field where he'd last seen Sheppard and Ronon. There were no slaves laboring out there that day, which seemed odd. But, then, this entire adventure was odd, what with Teyla ordering her friends be poisoned and enslaved, while she lived in a castle wearing ball gowns in the afternoon.

He used the impending darkness and his nondescript clothing to ease his way around the wall's perimeter, seeking a crack in the façade, an opening large enough to allow him in. The construction was millennia old and pitted with crumbled places and tell-tale holes made in wars long past. One portion of the outer wall appeared lower than the rest, sinking into a collapsing substrate, perhaps where an aquifer lay beneath.

"Simple," McKay said to himself. He pushed up his sleeves and hitched his breeches to give himself more range of motion. Then, placing a thinly booted foot into a hole in the wall, and taking hold of the mortarless edge of the lowest block, he heaved himself up and immediately began searching for another foothold, another handhold, another opportunity to breach the imposing edifice.

On one occasion, he lost his grip and almost fell back to the ground. His stomach leaping with fear, he managed to hang still to catch his breath, limbs shaking with strain.

Teyla could do this, he knew. She wouldn't have the least bit of trouble with it, either.

He continued, one hand, one foot, another hand, another foot, doubting that he would succeed, but never doubting that he should try. Then came the moment when McKay realized that he had made it, climbed a high wall without ropes or carabiners or help of any kind, and he giggled a little with surprise and delight.

The wall was about four feet thick, and offered McKay enough room to lie flat and take a breather when he reached the top. Still with luck on his side, no one appeared at all interested in this part of the cordon, nor had anyone seen him. He was so very proud of himself, until he realized that dropping down onto the other side meant pretty much a 20-foot freefall.

"Great," he muttered. There were no artillery scars on the insides of the containment wall, no advantage like that. Expecting the worst, he hung his legs over the side and lowered himself until only his fingertips clung to the top. Then he let go, dropped down about 15 feet, and was pleasantly surprised to feel only a giant shudder run up his spine but receive no apparent injuries.

"This is good," he said, pleased with himself. "No broken leg so far."

McKay had seen Teyla's carriage roll out beyond the fortress at sunset, before the moon rose. He hoped that it wouldn't return before he had a chance to find some food and discover how the Athosian leader had come to think of herself as the ruler of the muddy Seyans and their stinking fields.

Mostly recovered from the toxin he'd been forced to consume, McKay still felt some residual pain in his belly and bouts of dizziness. His food had been depleted a day ago. Surely going hungry was not going to make him stronger. So, McKay tiptoed to the rambling citadel in search of food and answers.

…..

Well into the night, the carriage pulled to a stop in front of the fortress. Teyla emerged and walked briskly inside, with Centris following closely at her heels.

"Please, Your Maje, you must eat or lose your strength!"

"I am perfectly strong as it is. Too much food has made me fat and lazy."

"You have been ill, King, taken to your bed for weeks. You awoke out of sorts with your body. At least allow me to administer your medicine."

"No," she said, stopping and facing her minister. "I was strong when I recovered but I'm failing, now. The medicine seems to be weakening me. Even this clothing weighs me down."

"Your royal vestments..."

"Just…just leave me be, High Counsel!"

With that, she bounded up the stairs, angry at how winded she felt at the top of them. Then, brushing aside the handmaids' offers of assistance, she stormed into her room and slammed the door. The window beckoned again, the silvery moon rising, making things vague beyond the magenta curtains.

"_Please…_" She heard this again and again, and the chasm inside of her yawned impossibly wide and she felt like crying for the stranger whose burial mound she'd patted hopelessly in the cemetery.

…..

McKay moved closer to the kitchen and its delightful aromas. He'd seen the carriage return, watched as Teyla and the sadist who'd ordered him chained stepped out and went inside. He heard them arguing but could not hear what was said. Just outside the kitchen door, secreted beside a large rain barrel, McKay waited until the cooks and cleaners completed their tasks, blew out their lanterns and left the room. Then it was time for McKay to enter and gather a light meal for himself. Once he was sufficiently strong, again, he would find Teyla and see her safely back to Atlantis with him.

…..

The king could no longer stand pacing about her chambers with silly handmaids at her elbow, distracting her with their fluttery concern. This night she needed to move, to flee, to sweat from effort rather than from the multitudinous layers of clothing hanging on her. This night, after so many thinking about the pale man and after today, when she missed him without ever having known him, Teyla needed to run.

The professor had been weak, so she had condemned him for it. This was the Seyan way; Centris had told her so. The professor had been alone and frightened like an orphaned child, but she had killed him anyway, had turned her back on him as he screamed her name, as the sound of it echoed in the dungeon.

Her clothing rustled loudly in the halls, and there was nothing for it but to find lighter materials, something practical that could withstand anything. The king wandered the halls of her own palace, lost and yet not. At the base of the back stairs, she discovered a dark portico, a mudroom for removing soiled boots and stacking deliveries. Cleaner clothing, men's clothing, was stored there, recently washed and hung to dry.

Off came her heavy brocade skirt and multiple petticoats. She unlaced her tight bodice and threw it aside. Next she removed her camisole and then the stiff corset, the bones of which left red welts on her skin. To be rid of this thing felt best of all and she inhaled deeply, feeling energized for the first time since coming out of her sick stupor.

The manly clothing fit her well enough, if she cinched the tie-belt and hitched up the breeches. Brushed suede boots replaced her dainty slippers and neither chafed nor flopped around.

"Your Maje…" a soft voice spoke from the kitchen doorway. A cook or a cleaner, come to finish up some last little thing.

"Dustmaid," Teyla acknowledged, feeling caught. But why? This was the king's home, _her_ home. These clothes were rightfully hers to wear.

"You are dressed strangely, Your Maje."

"I am going walking," she said firmly, moving towards an outside door.

The servant hurried away, and Teyla feared that she would be stopped. This was her in the night, not some child lost on the highway! Still, Centris seemed to like keeping her inside, as if the trees or the shining moon would change her.

No moon shone in this night, and the fortress windows threw out precious little light to go by. Still, the darkness felt enthralling, mysterious and full of potential. She hadn't gone far, was still in the courtyard, when a voice distracted her.

"So the Woman King is forgetting her fortunate life!"

Centris spoke from a distance, his words carrying easily in the quiet.

Then he cried, in mock surprise, "My king, look! See what it means to have incompetents responsible for protecting the royal line!"

Two sentries opened a door near the kitchen and shoved a struggling figure, unrecognizable in the darkness, into the yard. He was panting fearfully and the unmistakable clanking of chains echoed off the high walls around them. Many more sentries gathered, their usually stoic expressions now eager, hungry almost.

"Come closer, Your Maje."

Teyla did not move.

A rear guard pushed forward with a lantern and illuminated the prisoner—it was the pale man, the useless professor! His face was leaner and even paler than before, as he twisted his chin over the iron collar and chain that had been clamped around his tender neck.

"Tey—"he managed before a sentry pole axed him with an iron rod. The professor fell over awkwardly, as his hands were clasped by iron shackles and his feet strung with a short chain between them. He rolled in the dust, holding his head and moaning softly.

Centris approached and stood over the stricken man with rod raised to deliver a death blow.

"Stop!" Teyla shouted, and her Minister jerked in surprise.

"Yes, Your Maje?"

"He has escaped his fate. Perhaps he is meant to live."

"What, this feeble excuse for a man?"

And Teyla looked down at McKay's blanching skin, his hands that now bore scars and calluses on the palms. The empty place inside of her opened wider, filling itself with pictures of him leaning over tables all day, pushing buttons and talking a lot, and walking away from her with a smirk painted all over his face. Teyla found herself becoming irritated at him, annoyed as if he had pestered her for years.

She leaned over him and said, "You were carted away for execution, professor. Why have you returned?"

"To take you home." These words made no sense at all but sounded so right and so perfect coming from this stranger.

She saw crumbs on his clothing, now, a shining dribble of dried juice on his chin. The reprehensible scoundrel! She grabbed at McKay's collar and brought his face close. "You have been stealing our food, our drink?"

He spoke haltingly, as if the effort to speak were draining the life out of him. "Walking for days. Hungry."

"_All_ of my people are hungry!" she said, and in a moment she grabbed a sentry's rod and pulled at McKay's collar chain to force him upright. There was no pleasure in beating a man while he lay in the dirt. His eyes opened a crack and then widened when he saw the rod held aloft menacingly.

"No, Teyla, I can explain…"

She was both angry and tearful, hearing his tremulous voice, seeing the rivulets of blood running down the side of his head, over his ear and onto the heavy collar.

"You are a thief and a weakling. You fail to show me the respect that I deserve by speaking as if I were not your king but some servant girl. If you are so smart, professor, surely you realize that I don't know you!" she spat, jerking him closer, showing him the rod that would soon beat him to death.

"You do you do you do you do! We're friends. I swear it!"

"Swear! You swear to the air and to the mud. A man will say anything when he knows that he is about to die!"

Teyla raised the weapon higher and brought it down swiftly, and the pale man closed his eyes and whispered, "Teyla, _please_!"

TBC...


	8. Chapter 8

_Betas: Kam, Tazmy and Prankster, to whom I owe a big debt of gratitude. Thank you for your help and support. _

**Chapter Eight**

_hundred years, hundred more  
someday we may see a  
woman king, sword in hand  
swing at some evil and bleed_

"Teyla, _please_!"

The merest fraction of a second, and Teyla held back the rod at the very last moment.

He was a conjurer, a professor of tricks. _"Please."_

He was _"Please."_

a criminal _"Please."_

like his friends, the dark-haired man and the man with wild hair _"Please."_

that she had sent to toil in the field. _"Please."_

His collar was covered with his blood and his eyes were opened again but becoming unfocused,

but she was king _"Please."_

and couldn't care about that.

She pushed McKay away so that he fell back in the dirt again.

Centris watched with interest.

"You are a disappointment," he said, matter of factly. "Do the people of Sey mean so little that you would fail to execute a dangerous criminal in their midst?"

"He is innocent."

"How do you know?" With that he waved his hands and the sentries moved in to claim the pale man.

"No, you will leave him!" Teyla stood up over the professor, keeping herself between him and the guards.

"Have you forgotten your oath to serve in the best interests of your people?"

"I am your king. I am devoted to my people." But she wasn't so sure anymore because her anger toward the pale man was fading and her urge to protect him growing stronger with every beat of her heart.

The Prime Minister clasped his hands behind his back and leaned forward and back in deep thought. "You resemble our royal clan, but you are not of it," he said, nodding to his sentries, who moved again towards the professor.

"Leave him!" Teyla stood even more resolutely before McKay.

"You really are the image of Tarrissa, our queen, and you ruled as well as she until now, discarding the unproductive among us."

"I condemned only one man to death, and he is here, alive. I rescind my order and command that he be set free."

"Your conscience cannot thwart a death order, Your Maje. It is truly set in stone."

"I said leave him!" and with that she hoisted her smooth bar and stood ready.

"If you do not allow the executioner to perform his duties and do not take on the task yourself, then your sentries will do it for you."

She said nothing, but felt her body preparing for battle, her heart speeding up, her spine tingling as if she had switched on an extra-sensory device, as if she possessed an extra sense that had always been there, humming just below the surface of her consciousness.

The first sentry raised his bar and Teyla bent her knees to steady herself, and then her heavy rod connected with his arms and his head and then with his legs, all in one motion it seemed. As he fell, she gave a great shove and hurled him backwards out of her way, like a discarded apple core.

Another sentry was dispatched with equal speed. Others approached, most of them now without their usual smug expressions, but with fear in their eyes. Teyla easily disarmed one of them and then had two iron bars at her disposal. Left hand, right hand, left hand, right, moving and spinning, ducking and kicking, she took out one sentry after the other, all the while ensuring that no one came within striking distance of the professor, who still lay on the ground clutching his head.

Her weeks-old lethargy vanished with each blow to her hated sentries. They had placed collars on people, pulled them along by chains as if they were oxen!

Many men went down in the dust. Centris watched impassively as this happened. Teyla paid him no attention, but relished the idea of taking him down when she had the chance.

His hypnotic, velvet voice drifted by. "You should stop before you become injured."

"Never." Teyla moved against the sentries, wondering at the calm that centered her, for she was fighting for nothing but the life of a pudgy inventor, a tinkerer of sorts.

"He is nothing." The minister seemed to read her thoughts.

A hit to a sentry's side, a poke in the chest, a kick to the groin. Then a flick of her wrist and the man was sprawled ten feet away. The ones still standing hung back, now, some of them looking to Centris for guidance, but he calmly blinked, communicating his desire that they continue to fight their king.

"You never know, Teyla, but someone could come up behind you."

"I would know of his presence."

"What makes you think that, Your Maje? Have you fought like this before?"

Momentarily doubting herself, she turned, checked that her back was clear and faced forward, only to take a hit to the side of her face. The blow knocked her off balance and she fell to one knee.

Damning herself for listening to Centris, who seemed to have taken trickery to the level of an art, the king grabbed a lungful of air and leaped to both feet, still blocking, turning, knocking bar to bar, defeating each sentry in turn until only a few remained.

"You will drop at some point, my dear," Centris's honeyed voice, once so warm and calming, now grated on her nerves.

Then Centris motioned for the sentries to fall back. "I have saved the best for last," he intoned.

Teyla stood there panting, watching downed guards crawl away, cradling injured heads and limbs, and wiping at bleeding lacerations. At her feet, the professor groaned and moved a little in a semi-conscious twilight.

"The best?" she inquired angrily, breathing heavily and wiping grime from her eyes.

"When you and your people came through the ring, we thought that the gods had heard our pleas. Imagine, two strong men to work the fields, and a beautiful woman, the very image of our queen, to take up the throne emptied by revolt only days before. The three of you could have done great things for us. The fourth…" he gestured at the writhing professor. "He was concerned with machines and inventions, things that we do not need."

"Why do you speak of my traveling here with these others? I am your king, Centris!"

"You are a girl who came with this professor and two others through the ring!"

Teyla cast her gaze down at the professor, whose name was still lost to her, and saw only her memories of her royal training, her imperial tutors, gown fittings and rich meals eaten on golden plates with silver goblets brimming with mellow wines. She saw her mother and father, the people from the paintings in the Great Hall, sitting at table with her, also dressed in splendid clothes and making sure that the young Teyla minded her manners. Then this vanished and she sat at supper in a crude lodge, at a rough board, remembering her family destroyed not by rebellion but by invaders from the sky.

"I have lived here always. You are telling lies!"

Centris shook his head, just as she expected that he would.

McKay groaned again and, for an instant, Teyla felt as if she knew him, as if he were important for reasons beyond her understanding, reasons that lay deeper than the guilt that had plagued her since condemning him.

She placed her hand on the professor's shoulder and he grasped her fingers and held them fast.

"You will see," Centris replied, amused. "You did not sup this evening and the potion I've been giving you lasts only a short while. Once it wears off, you will remember your real life and be as useless to us as the professor. So neither one of you will leave here alive. My most skilled fighters now stand ready to take you and this professor both."

"What are you talking about? I am ordering you to desist!"

Centris flicked his fingers and the remaining four sentries came to attention, ready to engage in battle not with the king's enemy, but with the king, herself.

…..

McKay lay in the courtyard, uncoordinated and pretty sure that he had significant brain damage, seeing the very picture of grace dancing before his eyes. This was Teyla fighting with her sticks, moving brilliantly as if she were the embodiment of a great idea. There she was as he'd seen her before, fighting off predators. If he could have, he would have fought with her, just as he would have all the times before.

Then there were four sentries left and Teyla put her hand on his shoulder and he clasped it to give her something to show how much he appreciated her efforts on his behalf.

Then she rose to fight again.

He pulled her back, refusing to let go. "No, Teyla, I'm not worth it."

If he had seen defiance in her eyes before, it was nothing compared with what she shot at him now.

"I fight for both of our lives," she said.

"Oh." He paused. "That's okay, then."

McKay lay back once more. Then again came the reverberations of bar hitting bar and Teyla's breathing and the rustle of thin boots kicking up dust as the furious battle continued.

One man went down, then two. McKay allowed himself to believe that Teyla might win this after all. Then he grunted in surprise when an unseen sentry grabbed him from behind by his heavy collar and pulled back sharply. He clutched at the metal ring as it choked him. Teyla turned to the sound of this and in a flash was overwhelmed by the two remaining sentries still on their feet. They took her down hard, one striking her back and her neck, the other ramming her legs out from under her. She landed heavily, dazed, next to McKay, who felt his collar go slack as his assailant, satisfied with his ploy, released him.

The scientist gathered Teyla in his arms, uttering soft encouragement that he wasn't certain she heard.

"It's okay," he said. "You were great, Teyla. Really, I mean it."

It was hard to move with the cuffs locking parts of him together, but McKay did what he could to comfort his friend. Centris approached with more sentries. They all carried the iron bars so ubiquitous that McKay knew exactly what was to come.

Teyla stirred and McKay felt dismayed that she would have to die like this, lying in the dirt with him instead of standing tall in battle or else old and in a comfortable bed with her family all around her.

Centris said nothing but raised his weapon and McKay curled over Teyla's head, wishing that his last act could be something more meaningful. The bar wooshed through the air.

TBC…


	9. Chapter 9

_So, we come to the end of these adventures. Hope you have enjoyed the ride. My thanks, again, to betas Kam, Tazmy and Prankster. I can't thank you enough for your support and your selfless efforts to see this story through. _

_Many thanks also to the kind people who provided feedback. I appreciate your taking the time to do this. It means a great deal to me, a relatively new writer in this fandom, to hear that others like what I've written._

_And now, on with the show!_

**Chapter Nine**

In his last moment as a living human being, McKay expected to feel the explosive impact of Centris's weapon shattering his skull. A gunshot rang out instead. The hand that lofted the bar faltered; the heavy length glanced off McKay's shoulder—a painful blow, but definitely not fatal—followed by the sound of a body landing nearby.

McKay took a while to put the gunshot together with everything else. He looked up to see the unbelievably welcome sight of Colonel John Sheppard holding a P90 close and ready, taking dead aim at the remaining sentries, who dropped their bars quickly and stood away from McKay and Teyla as if they were contaminated. A few feet beyond lay Centris with a bullet hole between his eyes.

The Colonel said, "Anyone else here feel like beating on defenseless people? Because I can help you get over those urges."

No one spoke, not even the sentries, when the landed jumper uncloaked and Ronon Dex filed out, Carson Beckett and a half-dozen Marines close behind them.

OoOoO

On the eighth day of her fever, Teyla was visited by everyone who knew her well. She had fallen into a coma. This was the day that they thought that she was going to die, the day that their wonderful friend would be taken from them, for she had been burning to death inside her own skin.

Ronon came to sit at her bedside for a long while. Sheppard stood by, as well. They implored Teyla to fight this thing and win. Dr. Weir read from the Bible and Halling performed the Athosian rite.

The entire city was reverently quiet, as if a loud sound would scare her soul away.

Carson Beckett was beside himself. He came and spoke to her and said that he was so sorry, so very sorry, dear lass.

Rodney didn't feel like being there when others were present. Several times he'd put his head in the door, but left when he saw a crowd around Teyla's bed. Well past midnight, he entered the infirmary to say goodbye to his dear friend who knew him so well.

He seated himself where he'd sat for so much of the past eight days. He took Teyla's hand, as was his habit. Carson was nearby but he didn't hover.

"This is Rodney McKay, again. In case you don't recognize my voice…"

He didn't know what to say, so he was surprised when he started telling her the truth.

"Listen…uh…Teyla," he leaned in close so she wouldn't have to work to hear him. "You've been a very good friend to me. It's really amazing how strong you are and how you look like a little Ronon when you fight. Or how he looks like a big you when _he_ fights. But that's not the point…"

A little monitor at bedside started beeping, interrupting him. He let go of Teyla's hand and laid it gently at her side. Carson came by and switched out an empty bag of lactated ringer's solution for a full one. Then he nodded to Rodney and left.

McKay was not a demonstrative person when it came to showing affection, but he stroked Teyla's forehead and felt the heat rising off of her.

"I need to tell you, Teyla, that you've pulled my ass out of the fire so many times I've lost count, so I'm giving you one big thank you for that. You know if I could have I would have done the same for you in a heartbeat."

And now he leaned in very, very close so that no one else could hear, so close that he saw her pulse beating frantically in her neck.

"We need you here and don't want you to go. Everyone needs you very much. And…and I need you because if you're not here I don't know how strong I can be."

That was all he had to say to her then, and thought that if he tried to say more he'd just make a mess of himself.

He sat there for a while longer, not speaking, just there, in case.

OoOoO

"You okay, Rodney?"

He was still in the dirt, holding Teyla. His head was bleeding freely, so he tried to keep it from dripping everywhere and was glad when Beckett put a trauma dressing on and bandaged it with kling and some tape.

Teyla was taken from him and laid on a stretcher, which Ronon and another person carried to the jumper.

"What have ya done this time, Rodney?" Carson tutted, as he flicked a penlite into his eyes. McKay would have snapped back an answer, but he was too busy trying not to throw up the first substantial meal he'd eaten in days.

"Can ye walk, then?"

Answering that question would have required him to either move his head or speak, thus causing him to throw up, as well. Getting up and walking would have yielded the same result and so, ultimately, he just gave in and passed out, which solved that problem quite tidily.

OoOoO

As the sun shone gravid with the new day on the vast ocean surrounding the Ancient's city, Teyla's fever broke and she sweated and tossed her head about, coming out of her deep sleep.

McKay missed this part. He'd left the infirmary after he'd had his say and kissed his friend goodbye, thinking that he couldn't bear to be there when she breathed her last because, really, he wasn't very strong at all.

In the late morning he finally rose from his bed and walked back to the infirmary. On his way, he met Carson coming from the mess with a cup of tea and a sandwich.

"You've heard about Teyla, then?" Beckett asked, looking shot to hell and back with exhaustion.

Rodney stopped walking. He felt a little dizzy, which made him blink and put his hand on the wall, casually, so Beckett wouldn't know.

"She's…she's…"

"Ack, no, Rodney!" he said, breaking into a smile. "She's much better."

"B-better? Really? Oh, thank God."

"I'd say so. You look like you're going to fall over."

"I'm fine. Just…happy."

And he _was_ happy, in a way that he had never experienced before. It felt wonderful and terribly frightening at the same time, like Atlantis itself.

OoOoO

McKay's brief exploration of the royal palace—which ended when Centris had caught and collared him—had taken him into several extraordinarily appointed rooms, including some of the upstairs sleeping chambers. Although he'd had no lantern with him, enough ambient light from elsewhere revealed the astonishing beauty and craftsmanship of every inch of these magnificent spaces.

Home again, now, on a plain metal hospital bed wearing plain white scrubs, Teyla looked as out of place as she did angry. Her wrists and legs were held in soft restraints because from time to time she still thought herself to be king. McKay rubbed at his own wrists, remembering the scrape of the iron cuffs and leg irons, and most of all, the choking collar and the chain leash used to subjugate him. He felt sorry for Teyla—not the one who was king, but the real one—who would never have allowed any of this to happen to any of them.

He fingered the thick bandage on his head, pleased that the worst of the pain and misery of receiving stitches was behind him.

Groggy with drugs, believing herself at that moment to be Seyan royalty, Teyla looked at him with a hateful, heavy-lidded stare, and squirmed as the restraints held her fast.

"How dare you bring me here!" she snarled. "This is how you thank me for sparing your miserable life?"

In a little while, her mind would clear and she would be Teyla again. As he came closer, she tensed.

"Whatever you do," he said to her gently, as she turned her head to spurn him, "Don't even think about apologizing."

…..

In time Sheppard and Ronon explained a few things, in the vague manner that suited them.

The Colonel said, "Some guy and all these other guys jumped the bad guys guarding us."

"Guys?" McKay asked, looking at the calluses gradually peeling off his palms.

"Yeah. The one guy said that he knew you and that he thought that you were going to find Teyla, and that he and his cousins…"

"And cousins of cousins of cousins…" Ronon interjected.

"…were going to set us free and come back here with us. So they got medieval on the sentries and then we all ran for the gate before we got caught and came back here. With the guy and his cousins…

"…and cousins of cousins…"

"Yes, lots of cousins. Anyway, they're all getting settled on the Mainland, now. So, okay, then we launched a rescue for you and Teyla."

"No one from Atlantis came looking for us when we didn't report back in time."

"Elizabeth tried, but the Seyans had shipped us off to another planet entirely, a protectorate run by the same crazy people. Listen, it's a long story, but you're back, now. Teyla's gonna be fine. We'll debrief tomorrow."

…..

Teyla came round eventually. She was allowed out of the restraints and, after a longer while, was released from Beckett's care all together. She spent a considerable amount of time working off her kingly fat or else walking alone in deserted parts of the city. Several times a day, someone would buzz her headset inquiring where she was, and she always answered and told them the truth, even if she was someplace very far away.

…..

She let him in when he called one night. McKay had never been in Teyla's quarters before and seemed surprised at how well turned out the place was, with colorful fabrics adorning the walls and some candles around. Teyla herself thought it ironic that her room was rather like a tinier, more rustic version of one of the palace bedrooms.

"Here," he said, handing her a small box. "I've brought you something."

Opening the box, Teyla removed a round object, the orb that McKay had been fiddling with when she'd come to visit him in his lab the night before they began their terrible mission to Dorav, where they were tortured and where McKay would have died but for Teyla's help.

"What is it?" she asked, turning the shining silvery thing in her hands.

"It was an explosive. A bomb."

She quickly handed it back to him. He held it gently and rolled it between his palms.

"Oh, c'mon! Do you honestly think I'd willingly give you anything even remotely dangerous?"

She took it back and looked at its smooth surface. "I suppose not."

"As I said, this _was_ an explosive, but I've removed the detonator and the volatile chemicals and wires and whatnot, so all that's left is the outer shell, which is actually rather pretty, don't you think?"

He seemed immensely pleased with himself for having seen the decorative potential of the casing.

Teyla looked at him suspiciously, still moving the orb in her hands as if it were a fortune teller's crystal ball.

"Now, if you push here…" and he showed her a small indentation, the only different part in its uniform surface, "…it opens up." And there it did, exposing an equally smooth, shiny interior.

Inside lay a small object, a brooch made of golden metal that bore a familiar insignia enameled to the front of it: the prickly thistle with two black iron bars crossed in front of it.

"I found it in a bedroom in the castle when I was walking through. Kind of stupid, really but for some reason I pocketed it."

He pointed to the Seyan royal crest. Teyla had told Sheppard that she remembered well her time as king and all of the things that had happened, especially sending him off with Ronon to slave in the black-mud fields, and, most especially, condemning McKay and watching the cart carrying him dip over the hill on its way to the burial pits.

"See," McKay went on. "The bars are your Athosian fighting sticks. Remember when you were beating up all of those guys?''

She nodded, her eyes watching it play out once again. Then she asked, "And what does this sharp plant represent?"

"The thistle? It looks like thistle, anyway. Gets caught up on your clothes when you walk by. On Earth there are these bright-yellow birds called goldfinches. They eat the seeds. They like thistle even though the plant is prickly."

"So that means?"

He put the brooch back into the lovely silver-colored orb that had come from an explosive device, shut the opening and handed it to Teyla with a lopsided grin.

"Just keep it," he said, flicking his eyes toward the door, looking uncomfortable all of a sudden being there, just them.

Teyla sensed this unease and so she thanked him and let him go.

Once he had gone, Teyla took the brooch out of its shining cradle and looked at it for a long time, turning it over and feeling its smooth surfaces. In her mind she heard the sound of McKay's voice and he was saying, _"I don't know how strong I can be."_

He probably didn't know the answer yet, although it was plainly obvious to Teyla Emmagen.

THE END


End file.
